Chapter 21.
Create a Game

Although some people think that life is a battle, it is actually a game of giving and receiving.

—Florence Scovel Shinn, Philosopher/Author

Complete this sentence with the first word that pops into your head: “Life is a ____.”

What came to mind first? (Let’s hope the popular bumper sticker, “Life is a Bitch and Then You Die” did not come to mind.)

Whatever comes to mind first, here’s something that you (and we) can be sure of: that is exactly how life now is for you.

What was your answer? In a poll of mid-level managers, the most common answer was “Life is a battle.” But in a poll of senior executives, the most common answer was “Life is a game.”

Which version of life would you choose if you had a choice?

To be as motivational a leader as you can possibly be, you might want to show your people that life with you is a game.

What makes any activity a game? There needs to be some way to keep score, to tell whether people are winning or losing. Then it becomes pure fun.

So be clear that although all kinds of prizes may be attached to the game, the game itself is being played for the sheer fun of it.

How can you incorporate this into your life?

Chuck Coonradt, a longtime friend and mentor, is a management consultant and the best-selling author of The Game of Work. He has created an entire system for making a game out of work.

Chuck recalled that when he started in the grocery business, in the icy frozen-food section of the warehouse, he noticed that the owners would bend over backwards to take care of their workers. They would give them breaks every hour to warm up and they would give them preferential pay. But no matter what they did, the workers would bitterly complain about the chilling cold.

“However, you could take these exact same workers and put a deer rifle into their hands,” Chuck said, “and you could send them out into weather that was much worse than anything in the warehouse, and they would call it fun! And you wouldn’t have to pay them a dime! In fact, they would pay for it themselves!”

The key to making work fun, as Tom Sawyer taught us many years ago, is to turn what most people would consider drudgery into a game.

Randy was a leader-client of ours who had a problem with absenteeism. For many months he tried to attack and eliminate the problem. Finally, he realized that it might be possible to lighten things up by introducing the game element.

So Randy created a game. (Leaders create; managers react.) He issued a playing card to every employee who achieved perfect attendance for the month. A card was drawn at random from a bucket of cards. The employee then put the card up in his or her cubicle. At the end of six months, the person with the best poker hand won a major prize; the second and third best hands also won good cash prizes.

“My absenteeism problem virtually disappeared,” Randy later recalled. “In fact, we had some problems with actual sick people trying to work when they shouldn’t have. They would wake up with a fever, and their spouse would say, ‘You’re staying home today,’ and they would say, ‘Are you crazy? I’m holding two aces and you want me to stay home?’”

After being in business for four years selling a prepackaged management development program, Chuck Coonradt made what became the most important sales call of his career.

He called on a plant manager in a pre-constructed housing company. As part of their discussion, the manager began to give Chuck the “Kids Today” lecture—kids don’t care, kids won’t work, kids don’t have the same values you and I had when we were growing up.

“As he was speaking, we were looking over the factory floor from the management office 30 feet above the factory floor,” Chuck recalled. “He pointed down to the eight young men siding a house and said, ‘What are you and your program going to do about that?’”

Chuck said that he looked at their work pace and said that it “would best be compared to arthritic snails in wet cement. These guys appeared to be two degrees out of reverse and leaning backwards! He had given me objections for which I didn’t have an answer. I really didn’t know what to say.”

Then an amazing thing occurred—lunch. As soon as the lunch bell rang, these eight workers dropped their hammers as if they were electrified, took off on a dead run as if being stuck with cattle prods, four of them taking off their shirts, running 50 yards down the factory floor to a basketball court.

The motivational transformation was amazing! Chuck watched the game, mesmerized, for exactly 22 minutes. Everybody knew their job on the court, did their job on the court, and supported the team with energy, engagement, and enthusiasm—all without management. They knew how to contribute to the teams they were on, and they enjoyed it.

At 12:22 the game stopped, they picked up their sack lunches and their sodas, and began to walk back to their workstations, where, at 1 p.m., they were back on the clock—arthritic snails back in the wet cement.

Chuck turned to the plant manager and said, “I don’t believe there is a raw human material problem. I don’t think there is anything wrong with these kids’ motivation.”

And on that day, Chuck began a quest to see if it would be possible to transfer the energy, enthusiasm, and engagement that he saw on the basketball court to the factory work floor. His success at doing so has become legendary throughout the business world.

“Now we identify the motivation of recreation and bring it to the workplace,” Chuck says. “The motivation of recreation includes feedback, scorekeeping, goal-setting, consistent coaching, and personal choice.”